Grove Koger

Today’s post originally appeared in a slightly different form in the March/April 2018 issue of the late-lamented Laguna Beach Art Patron Magazine, edited by Christine Dodd.

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Palm trees are such a ubiquitous feature of life and art in Southern California that the state’s residents take them for granted. But the fact is that only one species—the California fan palm—is native to the region. Known to the scientifically minded as Washingtonia filifera, they grow in scattered and sheltered oases where they have access to water. The area around Palm Springs can boast the greatest concentration of the trees in the nation.

California fan palms fascinated European-American travelers, who initially had a certain amount of difficulty in seeing them for what they were. “In the presence of these ancient desert monarchs,” wrote minister and journalist George Wharton James in his 1906 book Wonders of the Colorado Desert, “it is easy to forget the activity of American life, and all association with the occidental world, and imagine oneself in the heart of the Sahara.”

In romanticizing the trees in such terms, James was overlooking a key aspect American life, of course—the life lived by the region’s Cahuilla Indians. Subsequently, in his 1914 book California, Romantic and Beautiful, he acknowledged that the Native Americans gathered “their big-pitted native dates from the palms of Palm Canyon.” The Cahuilla actually made use of almost every part of the trees—cooking and eating their pith (which they called maul pasun), gathering their fronds to thatch their roofs and weave into baskets, and filling their rattles with the trees’ dried seeds.

California fan palms became a favorite subject of artist Carl Eytel, who had traveled the region with James and who contributed more than 300 evocative drawings to the journalist’s account of the Colorado Desert. Having settled in Palm Springs in 1903, Eytel would be dubbed “the artist of the Palms,” and his painting depicting a half-dozen of the trees in an otherwise forbidding landscape, Desert near Palm Springs, hangs in the History Room of the California State Library.

Another traveler-author, J. Smeaton Chase, described the trees in terms almost as romantically evocative as James’s. “Though the palm is certainly not the most beautiful,” he wrote in his California Desert Trails of 1919, “it is perhaps the most poetic of trees. In symmetry of tapering shaft, fountain-like burst of crown, and lay of glossy frond, it is the ideal of gracefulness in plant life.” Chase went on to embrace James’s geographical metaphor wholeheartedly in Our Araby: Palm Springs and the Garden of the Sun.

James had noted in his Wonders that “in the sand-hills north and west of Indio, Mr. Fred Johnson is contemplating the planting of a sunken garden of date-palms similar to those found in the oases of the African Sahara.” It was an important observation whose story had its origin a few years earlier.

The Agricultural Act of 1898 had provided for employing “agricultural explorers” to travel the world in search of plants that “might be adapted to cultivation” back home. One of these explorers was Walter T. Swingle, who brought back shoots from a number of Middle Eastern date palms, including the prized Deglet Nour of Algeria. The tree’s honey-sweet fruits were already a favorite among the few Americans who could afford the high prices the imports commanded.

As it turned out, the trees thrived in the Coachella Valley, and by late 1916, an agricultural bulletin was noting that Johnson had “four 11-year-old palms that he raised from offshoots imported by the Government.” There were other growers as well, and just five years later, in 1921, Indio celebrated its first date festival. After nearly a century, the Coachella Valley remains the larger producer of dates in the United States.

California’s native fan palms and Middle Eastern date palms aren’t the whole story, of course. Legend has it that Father Junίpero Serra brought Canary Island palms with him to the Spanish colony of California in the eighteenth century, and since then, newcomers have taken over. Depending on where you live, you might see any number of the hundreds of species that have been introduced here—queen palms, windmill palms, blue palms, L.A.’s signature Mexican fan palms … The list is endless. They’ve caught the attention of some of the state’s best artists, from Eytel to California Impressionist Guy Rose, from Modernists Agnes Pelton and Richard Diebenkorn to countless contemporary realists. What would life in Southern California be without them?

The painting at the top of today’s post is Palms by Guy Rose. Further down you see Coachella Valley and Desert near Palm Springs, both by Carl Eytel, and a photograph of Deglet Nour dates by M. Dhifallah, reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia. The fifth image is a painting of dates by Agnes Pelton, photographed by Christy Porter from the collection of Robert and Kay Hillary.

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